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Get a Realistic Acoustic Guitar Sound (Part 1)

August 2, 2019

Surely you will agree that the acoustic guitar is one of the most used instruments out there. Countless everlasting hits in modern music were written for acoustic guitar, ranging from classical music and rock and roll, all the way up to modern hybrids of electronic music. Transfering the exact characteristics of a real acoustic guitar instrument to software, while capturing the unique behavior is not simple. However, recently some companies came close to developing a faithful digital emulation of the mentioned instrument. For this reason, we will divide this tutorial into a couple of parts since the interface and possibilities of the instruments are vast. Finally, we’ll show you some practical audio examples.

This library is developed in collaboration with Rosewood Recording Company, one of Utah’s most venerable recording studios. Guy Randle, the owner and recording engineer at Rosewood Recording Company, incorporates analog audio equipment to skillfully sculpt and emphasize the rich tonal qualities of the nylon guitar. For the sampling session, Guy Randle brought in the versatile and accomplished guitarist Michael Dowdle. Michael Dowdle has an impressive musical history. His session guitar work includes recording for artists such as Marie Osmond, The Osmond Brothers, John Schneider, David Archuleta, and The Jets. He also performed on numerous movie and TV scores.

We’ll start by loading a new instance of Kontakt player by Native instruments, into fresh MIDI channel within our own SoundBridge: DAW. The digital emulation of acoustic guitar we are talking about is named Evolution Modern Nylon and its made by Orange Tree company.

The Interface and Controls

At the top of the interface, you’ll see five sections labeled “Play”, “Strum”, “Chords”, “Tone”, and “Setup”. These buttons navigate to each of the sections of the interface. The organization of the interface and the controls enables you to get to the options you’re looking for easily. The guitar fretboard view lets you see the notes as you play them. That way, you can see which strings are you playing and their location on the neck. It also helps to visualize playing the elements on the fretboard like the fretting position, capo, and tuning of the guitar. Finally, at the bottom, we can see a piano roll. The blue keys represent the range of octaves. On the far left, we can see a range of yellow keys. They are housing guitar sounds like tapping, sliding and so on.

Moving to the most important part of this page of the interface which is “Mapping”.

Mapping

In the “Mapping” section, you have controls to customize how you want to trigger the included articulations. For example, you can set articulations to velocity ranges, latching and unlatching key switches, MIDI CCs, and more. As you can see there are options for articulations like palm mute, harmonics, buzz trill, or whole-step slide in. By setting the articulations to appropriate key switches, we can see that right part of the piano roll turned red. This is showing you the setting of the key switches range.

Audio Examples

Having set the articulations we like to key switches lets hear how Evolution Modern Nylon actually sounds.